Nightingale and Other Stories

Old folks getting smacked in the mouth and left sitting half-naked under the ceiling fan with nothing on but a shower cap. No Florence Nightingales at Nightingale Nursing Home at all. Lots of people are shocked, disgusted. They and the the family of those in the nursing homes have a right to be pissed. Who's to blame?

Well the list is long. The nursing home! The nurses, who by the way, gasp, are foreigners! PRC or Pinoys! The government for not doing enough spot checks by sending retired old civil servants disguised as one of those old folks with nowhere to go as their own kids kicked them out of the house. Did I say old folks who were kicked out by their own kids? In that case, add this to the list, the people who send their parents to old folks homes! Hey, but why would kids become so unfilial, so un-Asian society-like? These old folks must have abused their kids and were bad parents and it is karma! Everyone is to blame! Nobody is to be blamed! Wait, let's go into Western-style airy-fairy blaming - it is society's fault!

Irene Nursing Home and Serene Nursing Home also said that it gave the sack 3 staff, lo and behold, all foreigners! The undercurrents of xenophobia and foreigners are abusing our old folks, besides the stories of maids abusing kids! What do you expect when we outsource old folks care to these transient labour who are doing jobs that Singaporeans don't want to. Nursing is a unglam vocation and not a career that Singaporeans want to go into. To be a cool rich doctor, yes. To be a nurse wiping patients' arses, no. Nurses have to deal with cranky old folks that their own kids don't want to deal with. If they know that the patients' own children might not treat these old folks with dignity, why should they. Not everybody is a Florence Nightingale or a Mother Theresa.

Well to be fair, some people don't have the time or space in their homes to house their parents. O'rlly. They can't afford to send their parents to a retirement village in JB or in Perth, so they have to make do. So Nightingale and its ilk fit in nicely. Seriously ,some of these homes are probably professional and give great elderly care and maybe even most of the staff including foreigners are gentle and caring. That's just too bad as we want to focus on the cases of abuse and blame, and screw personal responsibility.